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Thursday, April 7, 2011

Caterpillar Transition Game

When it is time to transition children away from group time and into a different activity it is always good to have a transition game. This allows children to move more slowly to the next activity with less confusion.

Make a large caterpillar with different color circles and black legs.This caterpillar will be placed on my flannel board in the circle area or on the floor.

On the back of each caterpillar body part (circle) is a different action movements for the children to do.

As the children come up to play the game they roll a large cardboard box dice with color dots to match all of the caterpillars body parts (circles). A child comes up and rolls the dice identifies the color and then finds that color caterpillar part from the caterpillar. Once child finds the color the teacher reads the movement that child needs to do before moving on to the next activity.

I have a class of 24 children so to make things run smoothly I have two to three dice going at the same time. I run the game and my assistant is making sure that the children are following the plan that they gave to us as to what they will be doing during say free choice time or making sure that they wash their hands for snack and find their seat.

I made this for my 3 year old class, and it is a huge hit. I made mine a bit different though. I bought a 30 pack of foam circles at Walmart and then glued one of each color onto the die. Since there was only 5 colors, I made a "choose your own color" by adding 5 small slices of each color to make a circle. The remaining 25 circles are action movements, which have really come in handy over this cold winter !